Do You Know How To Reduce Your Freelancing Operational Costs?

Weekly Newsletter for The Freelancers: Here is the latest newsletter of the week starting on 8th July 2019.

It does not matter what type of business you are running, minimizing your costs is important. It may seem trite, but the money saved by reducing costs, is money earned.

When you are a freelancer this is tricky because you not only have to minimize your costs, but you have to look at the entire equation of income minus costs equals profit.

If you are under time pressure to complete a project and you know that you are going to miss the deadline and possibly upset a client, you have to make a value judgment and accept less profit for that project by outsourcing some of the activities.

It is different for operational costs such as power, heating, light, stationery where you can clearly see that these costs can be reduced by working smarter e.g. by having solar panels to reduce electricity costs.

This is very relevant nowadays as where I live a lot of people are doing just that. It has the effect of pushing up the prices for those relying on the grid entirely.

This is because the supplier’s fixed costs have to be spread across fewer consumers. It is increasingly so around the world.

In The Balance Blog Rick LeBlanc has written an article entitled: 29 Cost-Saving Sustainability Ideas for Businesses. This article is aimed primarily at small businesses, but we, as freelancers, should consider ourselves small businesses and where ideas are valid for our situation we should take them on board.

You can read Rick’s article here.

Motivate Yourself!

Did You Know It Is Not Unusual For Entrepreneurs To Go Broke Then Going On To Become Successful?

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As a freelancer have you ever felt like giving up and trying to get a 9 to 5 job? I have! Most freelancers go through that stage. It is a totally normal response when starting to work for yourself for the first time.

You can look back on your 9 to 5 days and be envious of those who do not have the responsibility of being the boss of everything that comes with being a freelancer.

It is important to remember some great inspirational quotes when you are feeling depressed and wanting to throw in the towel. I know of some freelancers who have inspirational quotes on post it notes put on the office wall. Not me, of course!

These are a few that I have found are very motivational, especially after a pitch for a gig comes back in the negative, or worse, does not get a reply at all. Here they are:

“Success is going from failure to failure without losing your
enthusiasm.”

– Winston Churchill

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”

– La Tzu

Failure is not uncommon. It is normal and a lot of people overcome it and go on to be very successful.

When you a feeling down after a gig rejection or failure, here is an article for you to keep in mind for a shot of motivation: From $0 to Millionaire: How 6 Entrepreneurs Went Broke, Then Became Successful.

You can read the article from Entrepreneur here.

Productivity Tip Of The Week

What Is On Your Regular WordPress Maintenance Checklist?

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Have you ever had your computer, website or social media pages hacked? It is a very common occurrence nowadays.

It is not only individuals like you and me that are victims, but big organizations like The Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. You can read about their breach here.

This is why we include articles from Robert Siciliano each week at the end of the newsletter.

At the freelance business level, there would be very few of us that do not have a WordPress website operated from your computer.

It is imperative that we have a routine maintenance checklist that we work through regularly. If we don’t do this, sooner or later it will seriously impact on our productivity and the ability to earn a living.

Adrian Try has written an article for the Sitepoint Blog entitled Your Regular WordPress Maintenance Checklist which looks at being prepared by carrying out routine maintenance. You can read Adrian’s article here.

Work-Life Balance Tip Of The Week

Do You Know How To Form Habits That Will Help Your Life And Career?

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Do you have trouble forming habits? A lot of people may, because it is hard work. However, habits can be life changing if you can master the techniques of changing and developing habits.

Here is one of the most powerful quotes that I have read on this subject:

“Your beliefs become your thoughts, Your thoughts become
your words, Your words become your actions, Your actions
become your habits, Your habits become your values, Your
values become your destiny.”

– Mahatma Gandhi

One of the habits that I have developed is to write one newsletter post per day so that I do not become overwhelmed at the end of the week when suddenly there will be five to do in one day. I am sure that you will have worked out similar systems of breaking jobs down to bite size pieces.

Leo Babauta is the author of Zen Habits and has about two million followers. He has written an article entitled The 5 Keys to Forming Any Habit. You can read Leo’s article here.

If you like the article and would like to read more of Leo’s work you can get a copy of his book Essential Zen Habits: Mastering the Art of Change, Briefly by clicking on the icon below:

Financial Tip of the Week

Freelance Retirees Need To Be Careful In Or Near Retirement

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It can be very tricky approaching retirement. There are many traps for the unwary and many are beyond your control.

One of the most costly traps for freelance retirees is not talking to your financial planner about how long your money will last and what you can do about it.

Freelance retirees are in a unique position in that they can retire part time and change their situation by using freelancing income.

You have to realize that not many financial planners are trained to be lifestyle financial planners, but for freelancers it can be a powerful tool to make retirement much more enjoyable and less stressful.

The AARP in the United States post GFC has made it their mission to help retirees and those approaching retirement. One of the trickiest situations is still having a home loan exceeding the value of the home.

This situation is not unique to the United States and can be seen occurring in other economies. Freelancers have time on their side in this situation, which is what is needed.

One of the smartest ways to deal with this situation is to retire part time This issue has also been taken up by the Australian Securities and Investment Commission’s Money Smart program and their article on the issue can be read here.

Freelancer Skills Development and Inspiration News

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We are constantly searching for news articles and videos on skills development and inspiration for freelancers.

Each week we have decided to bring you the links to what we consider are the top three articles or videos.

Here they are for this week. We are featuring some inspirational videos (click on the article description):

J.K.Rowling speaking at Harvard University (4.0 million views), click here.

Find Yourself (Best Motivational Video of 2018- 5.8 million views), click here.

Denzel Washington’s Life Advice – will change your future. (Motivational speech 2018 – 9.2 million views), click here.

There are now 5,000 skills in 90 categories that the digital economy can offer, according to Upwork’s 1st. quarter 2019 Skills Index which you can read here.

Number nine on the list is Salesforce Commerce Cloud. You can read about Salesforce Commerce Cloud by clicking here.

Articles now on our website that are relevant to the outcome of new skills training are listed here:

The latest one is here:

https://www.freelance-work-guide.com/retirees-freelancing-medical-hospital-ancillary-insurance.html

Amazon News

The weekly AWS news video link to acloud.guru is here. They are the leading trainers globally for Amazon Web Services freelancers.

Amazon Associates Website Case Study

As discussed in previous newsletters we are focussing on the niche website in the future because it is producing better results i.e. sales.

Here is a recent Best telescoping ladders – top 5 recommended. There have been 68 Amazon product sales (across all our websites) in the past month due to the keyword research and skills of Mamun, my virtual assistant.

Freelancers And Cyber Security

We have decided to expand our search for appropriate articles for freelancers about cybersecurity.

We have gained approval from Robert Siciliano to bring you extracts from his books related to cyber security for freelancers. Robert Siciliano is an identity theft expert and consultant.

He also runs a cyber security and fraud prevention website which you can see here.